166 Conclusion
and economic activities: in a 2017 report, Goldman Sachs estimated that
once driverless automation was fully underway, job losses would peak at
25,000 per month.
10
In the field of editorial gatekeeping, this has already occurred: strictly
speaking, rather than simply replacing human jobs, the role of algorithmic editors has been to monitor and channel much of the vast amount
of new information that has been produced and shared since Postman
wrote in 1990 or CNN was launched a decade earlier. It is worth remembering that when Yahoo! began in January 1994, it remained for a
long time in a list of websites compiled by Jerry Yang, David Filo, and
their employees; that was possible in an environment where the number
of estimated websites was little more than 2,500. When Google was
launched in 1998, this number had increased to some 2.5 million and
the new search engine was based on automated bots that could crawl
and index many more of those sites than any human editorial team could
manage. With an estimated 4.75 billion pieces of content shared across
Facebook each day, the information loaded into a user’s page is determined by software rather than human intervention.
11
With many of the
cognitive tasks used to sort information – including features such as
face recognition – algorithmic gatekeepers are a fact of everyday life,
though ones that may be easily gamed. With regard to writing, the future of algorithmic journalism is more uncertain: it is quite clear that
ever increasing amounts of content will be produced automatically, but
it is not certain that such robo-journalism will ever be able to break out
of restrictions around the need for structured data to make sense of the
world and produce readable narratives. Instead, what appears to be increasingly likely in coming years is what I have referred to as augmented
journalism, not the use of augmented reality (AR) but instead supplementing human activities via an increasing reliance upon algorithms,
apps, and software to collate information and present it in suitable forms
to be worked up by journalists. In a world where more and more news
is produced by fewer and fewer people, we are already seeing a number
of cognitive tasks being farmed out to machines to free up workers for
more complex operations that defy being converted into an algorithm.
Technology clearly changes behaviour: the various rituals around
consumption of news and how we relate to stories which appear to be
selected for us by close acquaintances (even if they really originate with
code provided by Google or Facebook) lead us to respond in different
ways to stories than if they had clearly derived from legacy or mainstream media. As has been made aware in recent years, that trust may
be given to news that is patently false and, while writing this book, it
has become evident to me just how volatile the nature of news is in the
era of a President who appears remarkably adept at using Twitter to
manipulate his message to a relatively narrow band of followers. What
has also been somewhat surprising is how rapidly attitudes to the Big
and economic activities: in a 2017 report, Goldman Sachs estimated that
once driverless automation was fully underway, job losses would peak at
25,000 per month.
10
In the field of editorial gatekeeping, this has already occurred: strictly
speaking, rather than simply replacing human jobs, the role of algorithmic editors has been to monitor and channel much of the vast amount
of new information that has been produced and shared since Postman
wrote in 1990 or CNN was launched a decade earlier. It is worth remembering that when Yahoo! began in January 1994, it remained for a
long time in a list of websites compiled by Jerry Yang, David Filo, and
their employees; that was possible in an environment where the number
of estimated websites was little more than 2,500. When Google was
launched in 1998, this number had increased to some 2.5 million and
the new search engine was based on automated bots that could crawl
and index many more of those sites than any human editorial team could
manage. With an estimated 4.75 billion pieces of content shared across
Facebook each day, the information loaded into a user’s page is determined by software rather than human intervention.
11
With many of the
cognitive tasks used to sort information – including features such as
face recognition – algorithmic gatekeepers are a fact of everyday life,
though ones that may be easily gamed. With regard to writing, the future of algorithmic journalism is more uncertain: it is quite clear that
ever increasing amounts of content will be produced automatically, but
it is not certain that such robo-journalism will ever be able to break out
of restrictions around the need for structured data to make sense of the
world and produce readable narratives. Instead, what appears to be increasingly likely in coming years is what I have referred to as augmented
journalism, not the use of augmented reality (AR) but instead supplementing human activities via an increasing reliance upon algorithms,
apps, and software to collate information and present it in suitable forms
to be worked up by journalists. In a world where more and more news
is produced by fewer and fewer people, we are already seeing a number
of cognitive tasks being farmed out to machines to free up workers for
more complex operations that defy being converted into an algorithm.
Technology clearly changes behaviour: the various rituals around
consumption of news and how we relate to stories which appear to be
selected for us by close acquaintances (even if they really originate with
code provided by Google or Facebook) lead us to respond in different
ways to stories than if they had clearly derived from legacy or mainstream media. As has been made aware in recent years, that trust may
be given to news that is patently false and, while writing this book, it
has become evident to me just how volatile the nature of news is in the
era of a President who appears remarkably adept at using Twitter to
manipulate his message to a relatively narrow band of followers. What
has also been somewhat surprising is how rapidly attitudes to the Big